


organza and honey

by Acai



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Boys In Love, By scratching, Depersonalization, Dermatillomania, Dex-centric, Domestic Fluff, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Falling In Love, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Fluffy Ending, Friendship/Love, Good Writing, Grief/Mourning, Hot Chocolate, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, POV William "Dex" Poindexter, Past Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Romantic Fluff, it's got angst but it's really cute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-02
Updated: 2018-09-02
Packaged: 2019-07-05 16:00:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15866958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Acai/pseuds/Acai
Summary: Will never meant to love Nursey.And yet, here he was.





	organza and honey

**Author's Note:**

> This is my 60th work, fun fact 
> 
> Please read the tags before proceeding! Nothing insanely major, but definitely some potentially triggering stuff. Take care of yourselves!

Sometimes, but not often, Dex can dream of being little again. In his mother’s home again and six years old, sitting at the kitchen table to the tune of  _ Wake Up in Paris,  _ the oatmeal walls and dark, wooden floors feel like a hug. 

He always dreams about his mother’s voice, soft as it floats through the kitchen. It smells like vanilla, but he never sleeps long enough to find out what she’s baking. The windows are cracked open and a gust of wind makes the bills on the island flutter up for a moment. 

The curtains hang awry, the old organza beginning to fade and fray on the ends. Their lopsided posture lets the sunlight trickle in lazily, dripping down the walls like warm, uncured honey. 

His mother’s singing pauses, and she turns to him and smiles, and everything tense in Dex unfurls and evens out.

She was all natural beauty and doe-eyes; argent skin like glass, and curly, flaming hair tied back with red bandanas. Even then, twenty-five years old, she looked barely nineteen. When she smiled, her cheeks would round and it would feel like a lottery win. She gave her lottery smile to everybody who she met, but Dex had long since concluded that nobody deserved it. 

She’s there, then, soft hands on his. She doesn’t say anything, standing and smiling, but Dex waits. There’s something in him that’s begging her to speak, to let him hear her words. 

She opens her mouth, and then his eyes peel open and he’s eighteen in a dorm in Massachusetts, crying into his pillow. 

When he sits up, the windows are closed and it’s raining. The dorm smells like old Febreze. 

The feeling starts small. The sadness that washes over him is manageable. When he stands, it’s like there’s a thousand rocks in his pockets and he’s swimming in gelatin. His body sprawls out over his quilt while he cries, and once he’s decided that he’s had enough of that, he forces his arms to swim through the gelatin to rub at his face.

The internet says that this feeling is helped with grounding, so Dex grounds. It’s almost nine, so his roommate is at class. The weatherman said yesterday that it would probably rain, but it’s still a horrible contrast to the warm sun in his dream. The rain pounds on his windows, and it’s not a pleasant sound. He should probably wash his sheets. He should probably drink some water. 

He stands. He drinks water. He changes his clothes. The feeling shifts. 

He’s not mad that she’s gone, like people tend to think when his grieving goes angry. He’s not angry that she died, though he’s sad. He’s angry because of how preventable it could have been, because her choice had been dumb, but he’d warned her.

She’d given out her million-dollar smile and loved all the wrong people, too fiery and too bold to listen to warnings. Dex can’t help but blame her, too, because her fun had dragged them all down. He’d never known his dad, but he couldn’t help but feel confident that anybody would have been better than the replacement guy whom his mother had loved. The loud, brash, violent anger had never been a complimentary color to his mother’s gentle, glass, kindhearted altruism. 

So he blamed her, and he blamed him, and he kettled his anger into one blistering, boiling pot of hatred that burned in his chest like an altar and melted the gelatin away. Like a toddler throwing a fit, he punched walls and shattered glass when he got mad. 

In the present, he opts for flinging all his pillows at the wall and shoving all of his belongings off of his desk. 

His notebooks, pens, and laptop go clattering away, and he hits the floor once, vengefully, before the switch in his gut flips again and he crumples to sink down the wall. 

He stays there until the floor gets uncomfortable, and then he shifts back to his bed, drawing his quilt up over his head and making himself small. He can’t sleep again, as much as he wants to return to his dreaming, so he lingers where he is, in a microcosm of grief in the middle of a world that keeps turning. 

By the time his roommate comes home, he’s picked up his desk and texted Chowder that he won’t be at practice that night. 

/ / / / / / / / / 

  He doesn’t stop dreaming of her. The dreams still find him, for the next year, and by the time he’s nineteen and sharing a room with Derek Nurse, he still finds himself in that tiny town of Maine at night. 

By now, it’s become a murky portion of what it used to be. When he dreams, the memories still pour in, but they’re never quite right. Will’s in a house, but it’s not his mother’s. The walls are off-white and the carpet is blue, and his mother is playing piano. The room smells like apple spice and cinnamon, and his mother’s eyelids are a deep orange. Her hair is curled. 

Even in his dreams, he has the sense to know that she hadn’t looked like that since she’d been remarried. After, she had always looked tired, and her eyes had been red more often than not. 

She’s playing piano, and the notes bounce off the walls and settle gently on the carpet. Will is sitting on a loveseat. His brother’s shoes are by the front door. Upstairs, something is banging, and he feels his stomach flip on instinct. But his mother just plays piano. Will wants to tell her to stop, to deal with the fire kindling in the home that’s going to ignite them all. But he knows that she loves  _ Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas,  _ so he lets her play instead. 

This isn’t their home. They could never afford a piano. Their living room never felt this cold. His mother couldn’t play piano without messing up at least a few times. His brother never put his shoes away. 

His mother finally does stop playing, and just smiles at him. She doesn’t say anything. Will wants to beg her. He wants to apologize. Without the piano’s soft songs, the banging upstairs only grows louder. His mother doesn’t do anything about it. She brings her hand up to touch her own cheek, and Will realizes that he’s crying. 

Outside, the sun is setting. The warm, orange light cascades in through the window. There’s snow on the ground outside, but there’s a fireplace going, and it’s so warm that Will wants to peel off his sweater. It smells like apple spice. The banging stops, and the whole house fills with a quietness. 

His mother opens her mouth, and Will wakes up. 

He’s disoriented for a second, as the warmth and quiet is ripped away from him. It smells like metal and leather, and it’s loud, and it’s cold. 

It’s raining. 

At the front of the bus, Holster is doing a bad rendition of  _ American Boy _ while Bitty blesses his heart and tells him to shut up. Next to Will, Nursey is writing on his arms. When Will breathes in, he smells cinnamon, but by the time he exhales it’s gone. His fingers twitch, and he covers it up by rubbing away the tears on his cheeks. Chowder is asleep across the aisle and Nursey is absorbed in his poetry, so nobody’s seen, but Will still feels like he’s shared something secret on accident. 

He scrambles to recollect his mother’s face, but the dream is already slipping away, so he sinks down in his seat and wishes he brought a blanket. 

Everything stays how it is as the bus ride goes on, and Will allows himself to linger in whatever feelings have come from his dreams for another hour or so. Then, he forces himself to let go of them and works on grounding himself. 

It doesn’t work as well as it used to. One foot is now permanently in Maine ten years ago, while the other resides here, on this bus, while the coach talks about the plan for the night. 

Half of Will stands up and gathers his bags when the bus stops. Half of Will hears Nursey talking, and stares blankly out the window instead of registering the words. Half of Will hears him groan and get off the bus, and catches the weird look Chowder throws his way. Half of him ignores it. 

The other half of him crawls up his throat and twists his gut. 

/ / / / / / / / 

The hotel room is nice. Nursey chucks his bag onto one bed, and Will takes the other one. His bed is closer to the window, and he drops his bag on the sheets and yanks the curtains shut so that he doesn’t have to look at the rain anymore. The whole room smells like laundry detergent and old socks. It’s cold. 

Will goes into the bathroom, next, closing the door behind him and turning on the tap. He puts on the hot water, first, and though it feels nice, it makes his vision foggier. He tries the cold, and lingers there with his fingers under the ice until his body comes back to him enough that he can splash water on his face. 

In the mirror, his hair is the same fire as his mother’s. Will stands there, with his eyes glued to his reflection and his hands under the water until his fingers go pruny. Out in the room, something thuds softly, and it jolts Will out of his weird daze. He blinks at himself, hard, and yanks his freezing hands out from under the tap. He towels off his face, shakes his hands dry, and goes back into the hotel room. It’s not so cold anymore. It sounds like the rain has stopped. 

Nursey gives him a weird look.

“What?” Will asks, going back to his half of the room to try and find a sweater. 

“What were you doing?” Nursey asks instead of answering. It’s irritating when he does that. “You were in there forever.” 

Will scowls in response. 

Nursey continues, even though nobody asked him to. “You do that sometimes.” 

“I do  _ what?”  _

“Space off. For like, five hours. I talked to you the whole way up here off the bus, and you didn’t even answer once. And the whole way here, you slept and stared at the ceiling? Dude, you just spent forty minutes with the water on in the bathroom. And, like, it was the sink. Who washes their hands for forty minutes?” 

“I do,” Will yanked the sweater out from the bottom of his bag. “And I don’t space off.” 

“Oka-a-ay,” Nursey replies. He says it all drawn out, like he’s trying to tempt Will into something, or like he knows something that Will doesn’t. 

Will thinks about how his brother always did that, and his fingers twitch. He puts on the sweater. Nursey gives him the same weird look as before. 

It’s a very Maine look. 

They go down for dinner, and Will thinks about pumpkin pie and apple cider even though they eat hamburgers and fries. The team talks about whether or not there’s really a store a block away that sells marijuana edibles. Will thinks about piano. Nursey watches him like a hawk. 

The longer that Will’s up and moving around, the more that his brain clears up. By the time dinner ends, the fog has receded almost completely, and he talks to Nursey and Chowder the whole way back to their rooms just to prove it. They go back to Will and Nursey’s room and watch Sharknado on the shitty cable TV— all three of them, on the floor even though the beds are less than a foot away. They eat the chocolate bars that Chowder brought in his bag. 

It’s nice, just sitting with them. Nursey asks Chowder questions about sharks, Chowder insists that he doesn’t care about actual, literal sharks, and the process repeats again fifteen minutes later. Will eats at least three chocolate bars, and it’s nice. 

They end up falling asleep there, and then scrambling in the morning once they realize nobody set an alarm and they’ve all woken up late. Holster is knocking on their door and telling them the bus is there for them to go to the game, and they all spring up—sore as hell from sleeping on the floor—to get ready as quickly as possible. 

Will thinks that nobody suspects they slept in late, but he forgets to look very hard because he’s so busy laughing. 

He only realizes that he didn’t dream much later, when the team is hyping up their victory on the bus back to Massachusetts. 

/ / / / / / / / / / / / / /

Will stays in Massachusetts fully for the next two weeks. He starts to think that he’s in the present for good this time, because he’s never gotten nearly this far in one go.

At the very least, it leaves him feeling clear headed and good when he finds himself in a kitchen from his childhood. It’s not the warm, comfortable home from his dreams about his mother. Instead, it’s a damp, dark, cluttered household. It’s messy, and reeks of cat piss. The whole house feels gross and small, and it’s littered with furniture that’s far too big. 

It’s hell, there. 

It’s fucking loud there. The TV is on and blaring in the living room. In the kitchen, Will feels exposed. He wants to scream. He feels nauseated and afraid on instinct alone, and his ears are ringing over the noise of the TV. He would go somewhere else, but he knows that there’s nowhere to go here. Everywhere in this house is just as exposed and loud. But he can’t leave the kitchen without walking into the living room. Hell is a circle, and Will knows the layout like the back of his hand. 

He wants to cry. 

Then, he hears a loud voice from the living room, and everything gives way to his anger. 

He’s angry, now, at the cacophony that’s going to split his head in two. He’s angry about the sound of the recliner shifting up and down. He’s infuriated by the noise of the phone ringing in the living room. The sight of this kitchen makes him want to peel away at his own skin. It’s a deep, pulsing, red anger that burns hot and blisters through his whole body.

He wants to  _ hurt  _ the man in the living room. That man. That man, that man, that man. That man who took everything. That man who tainted everything. That man who took his mother, and his home, and his brother, and everything good in the world—the one who shattered the world and turned it into this. Into this damp, musty kitchen and—

And Will won’t do anything about it. He knows he won’t. He’ll just linger in this and dream of college and leaving and getting so far out of Maine that he’ll never have to think of it again. 

The TV gets louder and louder, until Will’s alarm jolts him awake in his own room. The nausea and fear and anger follow him into the real world, and he bolts out of bed to go puke. Then, he sinks down to the ground and sticks his head in his hands. The clock on the counter says it’s almost nine. Nursey’s gone to class by now. Almost everyone in the Haus—if not everyone—if gone for something by now. Monday is the only day when Will isn’t gone this early, too. 

He stays where he is. He thinks about the house. He thinks about the smell of it and the anger. 

Then, he punches the wall. Again, and again, and again, until his knuckles split open and he’s left to sprawl out on the bathroom floor, bloody knuckles leaving a smear on the floor and he’s just crying. 

Eventually he settles. He cleans up the bathroom and his hand, then washes the sweat and tear tracks off his face. He opens the windows in his room to let in some fresh air. He texts who he needs to text to let everyone know that he has, unfortunately, come down with a bad cold and won’t be at class or practice today. Then, he lays on his back on his bed, and just thinks. 

His fingers twitch. 

He blinks. 

The next time he blinks, the door to their room is opening.  

Will would be confused, except the room has an orange glow from a sunset now, and Nursey’s hair is wet from a post-practice shower. He’s blinked away an entire day again. It happens, sometimes. 

“Hey,” Nursey says, dropping his backpack unceremoniously onto the ground and flopping onto his bed. “Are you contagious? Because I have plans for tomorrow, and I don’t want to get sick, so if you’re contagious, you’re sleeping on the roof.” 

“I’m not contagious,” Will wrinkled his nose. “What plans did you make for a Tuesday?” 

“Tuesday is a good day,” Nursey replies, as if it’s his civic duty to defend all the days of the week. “My sister is going to be in town for work. I’m going to have lunch with her.” 

Will hums, because he’s never met Nursey’s sister and doesn’t know anything about her. 

“I haven’t seen her all year.” Nursey’s rummaging through a pile of papers on his desk. He had a habit of piling everything up ‘for later’. Then, when later came, he could never find anything. If it were anybody else, it would have irritated Will out of his mind, the way that Nursey functioned.

Nursey was unorganized books on his shelf--tucked away with an indifference to their titles, authors, and colors. He was a jacket on the back of his chair, even though their closet had coat hangers. He was pencils on his desk, scattered instead of in a cup. He was a bedspread, pulled to the pillows but unsmoothed, like a halfhearted childhood habit. He was the candles that he burned but never wiped clean of char on the tips. 

If he were ever given permission, Will would have a hayday sorting through those books, hanging up that jacket, lining up those pencils by length, smoothing the bedspread, and wiping clean the candles. Except maybe he wouldn’t, because that was Nursey, and that made him want those things to stay. 

Somehow, Nursey made it tolerable. Irritating, but endearing. 

Endearing? 

Endearing. 

Nursey yanked a paper free from the pile, shooting Will a victorious grin. His phone chimed, and the paper was immediately placed back on the Pile for Later. Will rolled his eyes. 

The sun was slanting in through the blinds as it set, settling on Nursey’s face in scores. The room smelled like vanilla. The clocked blinked the same morse code message over and over again.  _ E. E. E. E. E. E.  _ Somewhere downstairs, someone was playing Shakira. Every now and again, the fan would click. 

It’s quiet, though. It’s a nice kind of quiet. 

Sometimes, Will wishes he could spend every moment of his life in this moment. In this room, in this city, with the morse code clock and the sunlight slated onto Nursey’s face. 

Nursey sneezes, and Will thinks  _ I love you  _ without meaning to. 

“Bless you,” he says out loud. 

And then Nursey is talking about Oscar Wilde, and the moment passes. 

/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / 

Will never intended to love little things with this kind of silence, but he finds  _ I love you  _ drifting across his mind with a growing frequency as the weeks of his sophomore year drag on. 

It happens in the grocery store, as Nursey feels at least twenty different lemons before deciding which one he wants. 

It happens when they both lean against the wall and Nursey talks about John Keaton, and his voice is deep enough that Will can feel the reverb of it through the walls. 

It happens when Nursey trips up the stairs on the way to hockey practice. 

It happens when Nursey FaceTimes him to show him a goose that he met on his way home. 

It happens when it’s almost three in the morning and Nursey is across the room in his bed, mumbling poetry softly to himself under his breath. 

Wherever he went, and whether he meant to or not, Will loved Nursey. 

He never meant to, and yet, here he was. 

It stays on the inside for a long time. Will never feels the impulse to do anything about it. He doesn’t want to get rid of it, because he can’t imagine his life as it is without that inadvertent love. He also doesn’t want it to go any further, because loving Nursey is nice, but the thought of it being any more than fleeting and accidental exhausts Will. 

It terrifies him, to think that he could fall in love and crumble the way that his mother did. It terrifies him, to think that being in love mutually could be so dangerous.

He never thought about it much--more out of denial than curiosity--but he knows that he’s gay. It’s not important. He can ignore it if he wants. And he does. Because he knows that he loves a boy in a way that he could never love a girl, but he also knows that the world is dangerous, and he doesn’t know how much he’s willing to risk to love someone. 

He doesn’t want to be his mother, or another sad, dead gay kid. 

The love stays inside, simmering in a broth of tiny, silent moments that make Will feel calm and present more than most other things never do. It makes guest appearances, though. 

At a party, while Nursey’s whole face is swathed in neon, cold-color lights and he’s laughing at something that Will didn’t catch. For a split second, their eyes meet right in the middle of a moment, and Will feels so in love that it’s overwhelming. They’ve made eye contact before, of course, but it’s not the eye contact that makes his face turn redder than rosacea. 

It’s the feeling that comes over him as they make eye contact, like for a heartbeat the world’s paused itself just for them. Like there’s a powerline between them, and all of the electricity for the whole city is bouncing back and forth between them with a vengeance. 

And then Nursey’s ripping his gaze away with the same firetruck cheeks, and they’re back to their separate bubbles of the Earth. 

/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / 

Nursey doesn’t smell like sandalwood or cinnamon, as much as his entire existence feels like it was designed to puzzle piece into one of his poems. 

He doesn’t smell like anything at all; at least, nothing that Will can identity. He just smells like Nursey. Like his laundry detergent and his shampoo and his moms’ house all mashed up together into one big Nursey cologne. 

/ / / / / / / / / / / / 

Will dreams again exactly one month after his last episode. 

His mother is next to him, on his bed. They’re in the good house again, the one from before. 

His mother is there, but he can’t feel her. They’re sitting next to each other on the bed, and she’s showing him a photo on her old phone, but he can’t feel her. The picture is of their fat cat sitting on the kitchen table, getting ready to knock over the kitchen vase. His mother is laughing, but Will can’t hear it. 

“I’m in love.” Will tells her. She doesn’t react. She’s not really here. So he repeats himself. “I love someone. You’d like him.” 

Downstairs, something is burning. 

_ I’m dreaming,  _ Will thinks. 

His mother smooths down her skirt, settling back to lean against the wall and watch the sun go down. The view out the window is oranger than it should be, and Will knows that their house is burning, but he’s had this dream before. 

He’s dreamed about fighting, and pleading, and begging, and crying, and calling for help, and trying to fix the problem. Every time, the house burns down, and when it’s gone Will’s mother looks a hundred years older. 

Nothing will stop the fire, so Will stays where he is. He remember this moment in real life. When it had really happened, there had been no fire. Just wedding invitations downstairs on the table and a catering company’s card stuck to the fridge. His mother had showed him silly pictures that she’d taken of the cat and they’d watched the sunset. His older brother had come in a little later to watch with them. It had been nice. 

In the dream, his brother isn’t there, and the smoking isn’t as suffocating as it should be. Will sits, and talks, and lets the house burn. 

“I changed my major at the start of my sophomore year. I like these classes more than my old ones. And I live with a fraternity now, but it doesn’t really feel like one. It’s alright. I like my roommate.” Will’s eyes linger on the family photo that he has on his desk. “I love my roommate.” 

Out the window, the pillars of the house are cascading down. 

“I still talk to James when I can. Not much, though. He’s happy. He got married last June. They only invited his wife’s family, but I was busy anyway.” 

His childhood bedroom is on fire. 

“I’m really mad at you.” Will can see the fire eating up the family portrait. “I don’t think I’ll ever forgive you for what you did. You hurt me. You hurt James. You hurt  _ yourself. _ You rushed into shit, and it ruined everything good forever.” The fire licks his curtains, and Will swallows hard. “I get it, though. You thought you were in love, so you did stupid things. I just really wish you hadn’t.” 

His mother only smiles at him. The fire draws close, but it never touches him. He wakes in the Haus, shooting up. 

There’s no fire in the room here, though. Just closed curtains and Nursey’s rumpled blankets in the bed across the room. There’s a weight that’s gone from Will’s chest, like he’s had a surgery that left a cavity in his center. 

The morse code clock tells him that it’s the middle of the night, and despite his exhaustion, Will knows he isn’t going back to bed. He drags himself up instead, staying away from creaky floorboards as he crosses the room and opens the door. The hallway is dark, but at the base of the steps the kitchen light is on. Will goes there first, skipping the noisy steps and walking as close to the railing as he can. 

In the kitchen, Nursey is sitting at the table in a rumpled sweater, typing on his laptop. He glances up at Will as he steps into the room, blinks once, and then checks the time on his laptop to make sure he hasn’t stayed up all night. 

“Essay?” Will asks. 

“Thoughts,” Nursey replies. 

And that’s that. Will shuffles through the kitchen for cocoa mix and mugs, making two out as a force of habit that allows him to set the extra on the table next to Nursey’s laptop. He wonders what kind of thoughts race through Nursey’s head in the middle of the night. He’d like to hear about them, someday. 

“Why are you awake?” Nursey asks as Will slouches in the chair next to him. 

_ Sometimes I dream about my dead mom and talk to her, and waking up at three in the goddamn morning is a shitty side effect of dying, which happens in most of them. _

“Dunno.” Will can feel pennies in his pockets, but he doesn’t remember what they’re from. “Just am.” 

It’s a good enough answer for Nursey, who yawns widely and goes back to typing. Impulsively, Will’s head falls to rest on the other boy’s shoulder. Neither of them talks about it, but he knows that Nursey doesn’t mind it. They linger, Nursey typing and Will closing his heavy eyelids. 

At some point, he falls asleep before he can drink his hot chocolate. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I'd like to write two follow-up fics to this, so by all means, please leave a comment if you liked this! 
> 
> Or, better yet, send me a message on any of the media below! 
> 
> Tumblr: 12am  
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> 
> Thanks for reading!


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